Globus Adoption Grows Among European Institutions
Subscriptions by large facilities contribute to sustainability for the leading research data management service
CHICAGO, September 19, 2022 — Globus enables Europe’s leading research institutions to eliminate many common research data management hurdles. Over the past year, European organizations that joined the Globus subscriber community include the Max Planck Computing and Data Facility (MPCDF), Vlaams Supercomputer Centrum, and the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF).
There is a growing need for data access, transfer, sharing and collaboration to solve the grand challenges we are facing today. More data, more compute power, and rapidly evolving techniques require that researchers use highly scalable data management tools like Globus to reliably and securely access, transfer and share their data, reducing the time-to-insight for their data-intensive research.
For example, the MPCDF uses Globus for large scale data transfers to and from its HPC systems, and to support projects such as the Fotothek of the Biblioteca Hertziana in Rome and the Virgo Consortium, represented by the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics. These projects make use of Globus premium functionality to automate data transfers and for large scale data sharing with collaborators around the world.
“With the ever-increasing amount of research data—be it from observations, experiments or simulations—a solid, robust and easy-to-use solution for data transfer, sharing and publishing becomes ever more important for researchers,” said Dr. Raphael Ritz, Head of Data Division at MPCDF. “The Globus subscription service provides researchers within the Max Planck Society a feature rich tool which also supports data handling in line with the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Re-usable) principles, which are gaining increased recognition in modern research projects.”
At the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility—an institution that supports research in 22 countries—scientists were encountering increasing difficulties in transferring data back to their own laboratories for processing. The growing support burden led the ESRF to research new technologies to overcome these data management challenges and they determined that Globus met their needs.
“Now that we are using Globus we hardly see any support tickets related to data transfers,” said Jean-François Perrin, Head of IT Services at ESRF. “As datasets have exploded, and as our researchers are moving anywhere from GBs to TBs of data at a time, the previous data transfer methods researchers we were using are no longer working. With Globus researchers have an extremely simple and reliable way to transfer data. It just works.”
“We are gratified to see growing financial support for the Globus service from European institutions,” said Rachana Ananthakrishnan, executive director of Globus. “Solving the world’s biggest challenges requires a global effort, and effective research data management is essential to success. Ensuring sustainability of the Globus service is critical to our continued support of these efforts.”
About Globus
Globus is a platform for research data management, used by leading non-profit and commercial research organizations, national laboratories, and government facilities worldwide. Operated by the University of Chicago, the Globus service enables secure, reliable file transfer, sharing, and data management automation throughout the research lifecycle. The service currently supports more than 1,600 organizations in over 80 countries, and is used to transfer, on average, over one petabyte of data daily. Globus is supported by a hybrid free and subscription-based model, with additional funding from the DOE, the NSF, the NIH, and NIST.